Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF ARTS in the DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES at the UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND, 2000. / Topics falling under evaluative morphology have been wrongly placed in most grammar books dealing with African languages. cf. Doke (1956), Ziervogel and Mabuza (1996) and Nyembezi (1965) have placed diminutives , augmentatives and reduplication of nominal stems under derivative forms of the nouns. They also place the evaluative verbal extensions under verbal derivatives. This situation has led to inadequate and misleading treatment of . such topics. Most scholars have treated these topics in passing. Less attention has been paid to this aspect of Zulu grammar. This study endeavours to highlight important aspects of evaluative morphology. We want to ascertain whether or not the branch of morphology known as evaluative morphology is worth pursuing in Zulu. We shall therefore develop a theoretical basis for Zulu evaluative morphology. This study will attempt to deal with some important aspects of evaluative morphology. These aspects are :evaluative affixes used with nominals, evaluative affixes used with personal names and evaluative affixes used with the verb. Non-evaluative affixes will be excluded from this study.

This dissertation investigates interactions between gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology in a sample of 100 African languages, and provides a method for assessing the role that these interactions play in the grammatical complexity of gender systems. The dissertation is organised around three research foci. First, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and number along the following dimensions: exponence, syncretism, indexation, correlations in type of marking, and gender assignment. The study provides evidence for the possibility that nominal features are organised in a relevance hierarchy. In addition, the study shows that animacy and lexical plurality play a crucial role in the distribution of special patterns of plural indexation. The study also shows that pervasive indexation systems in the language sample always involve both gender and number. Finally, the study shows how gender assignment can be used as a means for encoding variation in the countability properties of nouns and noun phrases. Second, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and evaluative morphology in the languages of the sample. Two types of interactions are found. The study shows that the distribution of the two types depends on three factors: the type of gender system, the number of gender distinctions and the possibility of assigning a noun to more than one gender. Third, the dissertation investigates the role that interactions of gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology play in the absolute complexity of gender. The study proposes a metric for gender complexity and uses this metric to compute complexity scores for the languages of the sample. The results suggest that the gender systems of the language sample lean toward high complexity, that genealogically related languages have the same or similar complexity scores, and that the distribution of the outliers can often be understood as the result of language contact.

Marqueur linguistique très usité dans la comédie, la forme diminutive est une des particularités de la langue d’Aristophane. Comparables au suffixe -ette en français (e.g. maison > maisonnette), les suffixes -ιον et -ισκος sont utilisés par des personnages de tous les genres et de toutes les classes sociales pour exprimer leur évaluation diminutive. Parfois utilisés pour représenter un objet plus petit, parfois pour complimenter et parfois pour exprimer son dédain, les diminutifs sont difficiles à définir et encore plus complexes à démêler des autres formes qui peuvent partager leur suffixe. La première étape de ma recherche a donc consisté à créer un schéma radial capable d’expliquer les différents aspects sémantiques et pragmatiques du diminutif dans le dialecte attique d’Aristophane. La seconde partie de ma recherche a servi de vérification du schéma radial proposé. À travers une méthode établie à partir du schéma radial et de la définition morphologique du diminutif grec, j’ai classé et vérifié les termes trouvés par une application de traitement automatique des langues naturelles créée dans le cadre de cette recherche. Ces données ont également servi à vérifier certaines hypothèses sur la fréquence d’apparition du diminutif et sa variété d’expression dans le sociolecte féminin chez Aristophane. Sujet encore débattu chez les linguistes, la relation entre le genre et l’expression est au centre des préoccupations de la recherche actuelle en morphologie évaluative. L’ensemble de cette recherche se veut donc également une description d’un cadre méthodologique adapté à l’analyse des textes anciens à l’aide de méthodes informatiques. / A linguistic marker widely used in comedy, the diminutive form is one of the distinctive features of Aristophanes' language. Comparable to the suffix -ette in French (e.g. maison > maisonnette), the suffixes -ιον and -ισκος are used by characters of all genders and social classes to express their diminutive valuation. Sometimes used to represent a smaller object, sometimes to compliment and sometimes to express disdain, diminutives are difficult to define and even more complex to disentangle from other forms that may share their suffix. The first stage of my research therefore involved creating a radial scheme capable of explaining the various semantic and pragmatic aspects of the diminutive in Aristophanes’ attic dialect. The second part of my research served to verify the proposed radial scheme. Using a method based on my radial scheme and the morphological definition of the greek diminutive, I classified and verified the terms found by a natural language processing application created as part of this research. These data were also used to test certain hypotheses on the frequency of appearance of the diminutive and its variety of expression in Aristophanes' feminine sociolect. The relationship between gender and expression is still a hotly debated topic among linguists, and is at the heart of current research in evaluative morphology. The whole of this research is therefore also intended as a description of a methodological framework suitable for the analysis of ancient texts with computational methods.